With golden guilder ears: Perceptions of Amsterdam

In the early sixties Amsterdam is ethnically diverse. There are Chinese restaurants, Indonesian office clerks, and black café patrons, dockworkers, and fairground-goers. The city’s art life is that of every middle-class city with a large working class: ladies and gentlemen frequent the theater, concert hall,

and museum; ordinary families visit the circus, the park, and the bar. There was a lot going on in Amsterdam, but no happenings as yet. The images for the book and exhibition were created by talented amateurs and established photographers like Eva Besnyö, Leonard Freed (later a Magnum Photos member), Philip Mechanicus, and Eddy Posthuma de Boer.

Notable by their absence were the two photographers who, during the sixties, would become synonymous with Amsterdam, even on the international stage: Ed van der Elsken and Cor Jaring. Socially, Van der Elsken was certainly part of the local bohemian crowd, but in his work he was mainly drawn to those places on the fringes or underbelly of society, where the idea of “domesticity” received a very different interpretation. Jaring became the house photographer of the “Magic Center.” It was his camera that captured the now iconic images of the gatherings at the Lieverdje with Robert Jasper Grootveld, Bart Huges with a hole in his head, and the first happenings around Grootveld and Simon Vinkenoog [ill Vinkenoog uit Jarings Amsterdam, p. 86].

When the Provo movement added a pronounced flavor of social activism to the artistic side of Amsterdam’s counterculture, it was documented by Jaring and Van der Elsken alike. They chronicled the protests and police violence elicited by the marriage of Beatrix and Claus, as well as the white-painted bikes and increasingly long hair.

During this time the city soon came to see itself as part of the rebelliousness that was also associated with the capital in the Stedelijk exhibition of 1961. In the book Amsterdam, een lastige stad (1970), Johannes Marius Fuchs looked at the pedigree of what was clearly a trait innate to Amsterdammers; the scuffles of 1966 were cast as the final act in a sequence of revolts that also comprised the so-called Communist Rising of 1848, the Eel Revolt of 1886, and the February Strike of 1941. Fuchs, however, went a step further. He called the chapter of his book that examines the construction workers’ protest of 1966 “the long hot summer,” presenting the events of those months as a prequel to the Long, Hot Summer in the United States a year later. Apart from the fact that the summer of 1967 in America witnessed the deaths of more than seventy people, riots in 159 cities, and the destruction of 2,500 stores in Detroit alone—wholly incompatible with the single fatality in Amsterdam (death by natural causes), the twelve broken windows shattered when construction workers stormed the headquarters of the daily paper De Telegraaf, and a handful of burned cars—what happened here hadn’t been seen since the Dutch Golden Age: Amsterdam was again considered a model, a city that sets an example for the rest of the world.2

The world looks at Amsterdam

This wasn’t completely unfounded. The Provo movement had caused an international furor, and the capital would quickly become the epicenter of counterculture on the continent. The addition of “continent” here is nevertheless important as a relativization. However notorious Amsterdam would become in the late sixties, the infamous incidents and individuals had a history that was by no means always local. Although with Vinkenoog and Constant a line can be traced from the Experimental Group in Holland, Cobra and the Situationists, to Provo and their descendants, the American and British youth cultures were largely responsible for setting the tone throughout these years. The Provos were also seen in this light abroad. In her booklet Protestformen der Jugend (1969), Else Pelke spoke of the Provos in the same breath as beatniks, “Gammler” (the German version of the Dutch “nozems,” or rebellious youth), and hippies, and justifiably placed the Dutch phenomenon within the context of the new cultural form of the Happening.3

Along with LeRoi Jones (later known as Amiri Baraka), Joans was a rare black voice in the Beat world, and in 1966 he and stanley brouwn provided the only black contributions to the famous manifesto issue, edited by Vinkenoog, of the magazine Randstad (Joans provided information about the early happenings put on by Allan Kaprow and Claes Oldenburg).4

And then a meaningful anomaly occurred. In 1970 Van Gennep published Mijn zwarte gedachten. Een manifest by Joans, a Black Power text both poetic and irreconcilable—completely in line with other books by black figureheads such as Stokely Carmichael that appeared in the Kritiese Biblioteek during this time. The text on the back flap stresses the relationship between the fight for civil rights in America with the struggle for emancipation in Africa (and Joans does the same: “Black Power will teach all blacks that Timbuktu is just as important for African Americans as Bowling Green”5), but anything to suggest that this struggle might also include the Dutch colonies in Latin America is nowhere to be found

you kidnapped us from Africa in your boats

I scream in Rotterdam

I scream in Den Haag

I scream in Amsterdam

and in goddamn Haarlem

I shout in pain and poverty

for the twenty black men

and women inside of me

Holland hear me help me

my message travels

the universe with speed

reparation! reparation

for black people

the twenty now more

than twenty million all

in desperate need

Holland you must hear

the price to pay is not

too dear Pay it now

before it’s too late Pay

the price or join South

Africa’s future fate!7

Was Amsterdam, or Holland, able to hear this call for reparation? There are few indications. The Dutch government was occupied with very different concerns and, spurred by the sudden eruption of counterculture, the country and predominantly the capital had acquired a hip, and hence entirely unhistorical and morally questionable image. Rolling Stone, the American counterpart of Hitweek since 1967, and now well on the way to becoming the new generation’s Bible, dispatched reporters to Amsterdam; they couldn’t believe their eyes and ears.8 Before long, the city would become a sanctuary for mostly long-haired youth from all over the world.

In the ratatouille he served up, Lewis did not distinguish between forms of exploitation he presented as an opportunity (“It’s the place where you can rent a girl for cut-rate prices”), an exclusive agency for call-girls, gay bars, and the happenings of the Sigma Foundation (“Amsterdam’s tabernacle of the super-kooky”), where one Simon V. (Vinkenoog, probably) tried to convince the sensationalist author of the artistic content and the life-changing ambitions paraded there.

Little center

Internationally, Amsterdam rapidly acquired a special reputation, but in the international art world, the city was for the moment associated with the minimalism of Nul, Arte Povera, and the conceptualism of Ger van Elk, Marinus Boezem, and Jan Dibbets, or the geometric abstraction of Ad Dekkers (the only Dutch contribution to documenta 4 in 1968), rather than with the exhibitionistic burlesques of Sigma.13 When the city was the subject of an exhibition at the prestigious Guggenheim in New York in the early seventies, the same Dekkers was invited, along with Jeroen Henneman, Reinier Lucassen, Jan Roeland, Jan Schoonhoven, and the artist who had been allowed to fill the Dutch pavilion during the Venice Biennale in 1968, Carel Visser. Not only Amsterdam, however, was presented at the Guggenheim.14

In the catalogue accompanying the Amsterdam Paris Düsseldorf exhibition (1972), Guggenheim director Thomas M. Messer gave no clear explanation of what, exactly, bound these three cities together.

Messer formulated a modest ambition: to introduce the museum visitor to artists who worked in an international style (and thus belonged to a globalizing art world), but whose only chance to break into the New York scene was to be shown by a local museum or picked up by a gallery. This instantly speaks volumes about how “sophisticated” the global atlas of art really was: even those from Buenos Aires or Milan who wanted to make it would have to pass through New York, while New York artists who made it in their own city instantly commanded a world stage. It made the title of the exhibition in the Guggenheim even more interesting. Amsterdam and Düsseldorf were indeed part of the art world, but that Paris was presented on the same level was nothing less than a statement—perhaps even an insult. Blaise Gautier, director of the Centre national d'art contemporain and the author of the short introduction to the Paris section of the catalogue, could hardly ignore it, but tried to give a positive twist.

In postwar West Germany, however, the city rapidly emerged as perhaps the most important hub of contemporary art. Joseph Beuys and Sigmar Polke were active there, it was where Zero pioneers Heinz Mack, Otto Piene, and Günther Uecker studied or taught, where Gerhard Richter and Konrad Lueg launched their Leben mit Pop – eine Demonstration für den kapitalistischen Realismus in 1963, and the city where Bernd and Hilla Becher presented their black-and-white photographs of industrial heritage in the late sixties. The Bechers, Beuys, Polke, and Uecker were part of the Guggenheim’s Düsseldorf selection, together with Marcel Broodthaers and Dieter Rot, among others. The résumés of those Belgian and Bern-educated artists illustrates how relative this association with the capital of North Rhine-Westphalia was. Broodthaers made iconic exhibitions at the Kunsthalle in Düsseldorf, but Wide White Space in Antwerp was also crucial in his early years. For his part, Rot exhibited in the gallery of René Bock in West Berlin, but also in legendary exhibitions like Bewogen beweging (1961) and Schrift en beeld (1963) at the Stedelijk.

All things considered, Antwerp could also have been part of the Guggenheim exhibition, but more fundamentally, following the same logic, Rot could just as easily have fitted into the Amsterdam contingent. Although cities like Amsterdam and Düsseldorf owed their fame as centers of modern art to their renowned museums, their reputation also undeniably rested on their place in international avant-garde networks such as Fluxus and Nul/Zero.15 For Amsterdam, these associations were of great importance. They demonstrated that the city—with the immutable image projected by dag amsterdam—had become an important pivot in the increasingly internationalizing avant-garde shortly after the Second World War, and that, despite the cyclical course of days and seasons, an in-depth cultural transformation was on the horizon.

About the author

Geert Buelens is Professor of Modern Dutch Literature at Utrecht University, and the author of De jaren zestig. Een cultuurgeschiedenis (Ambo/Anthos, 2018).

Notes

Bibliography